Introduction

Late last week I was talking to Seagate about Desktop HDDs and upon going through their portfolio, looking at model numbers came across this 10TB solution. As distracted as I was, I inquired about these drives, and here I am Tuesday morning, and the drives just arrived. Straight out of the packing and shipping materials, you can tell these drives are completely different; the casings appear to be machined instead of forged and that alone reduces weight.

Seagate touts these drives as low power and low weight solutions, and while I cannot comment on the power consumption of these just yet, there is a noticeable difference in weight as I mentioned above. With that said these drives pack in a lot of technology to get 10TB of capacity including a completely new design that leverages a seven platter and fourteen head design. Helium has been added to the recipe, which also includes Seagate's PowerChoice and PowerBalance technologies, these two technologies work in tandem to reduce power consumption and offer an optimized IOPS/Watt efficiency.

These are very important metrics as this solution is rated for 550TB/yr workloads, which is equal to 10x a typical desktop drive, and adding to this Seagate has increased the MTBF to 2.5 million hours.

It took some digging around to find a spec sheet for these drives but alas, I was able to find it. This Enterprise Capacity solution comes from the 6th generation of drives and offers a full lineup of features including sensors for humidity, helium pressure, and temperature. Further down, we have mention of the cache, which is 256MB and just a few more lines down the MTBF and NREBR that is at 10e15. Spindle speed is set at 7200RPM with a sustained transfer speed of 254 MB/s and an average latency of 4.16ms.

Power consumption is said to hover around 4.5w at idle, while in use is said to consume between 6.5 to 8 watts.

At the time of writing, we had no MSRP set in stone. Looking around, I have found this drive anywhere from $609.99 and $649.99 with a five-year warranty.

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